Stockholm

Stockholm is the geographical center of the novel’s electrical disturbance and the first reported mass return of the dead. The city’s crisis unfolds across a widening metropolitan region: an unexplained surge in the electrical current coincides with awakenings in morgues and cemeteries, while officials struggle to determine what has happened and how to describe it.

The disturbance and its first signs

On the evening of the disturbance, a radio report says the phenomenon appears confined to the Stockholm region and that the current in some areas resembles an incipient lightning strike. David Zetterberg, waiting at a club in case Eva Zetterberg calls, feels the hairs on his arms rise; he cannot tell whether the sensation is a shiver or static electricity. The report gives the crisis a regional boundary, but not an explanation, and the bodily sensation makes an immense electrical event momentarily intimate.

The return of the dead

Between 23:10 and 23:20, the dead come back to life at every morgue in the greater Stockholm area. The account then notes an apparently separate street report at 23:18: an old man, naked and unresponsive to speech, is seen outside the Solkatten aged-care facility, and police are called to return him home. Together, these early incidents place the crisis both inside institutional spaces where the dead are kept and among the living in public streets.

Emergency response and significance

By 00:42, reliable reports of awakenings in cemeteries reach the Dead Room, a temporary command center established in a conference room at the department. Officials estimate that around 980 people are involved, and police say they lack the resources to manage the exhumations; at 00:50, responsibility for exhuming the bodies is transferred to the military. The sequence turns Stockholm from the bounded region named in an initial radio report into the center of a rapidly expanding administrative emergency. Its measured times and estimated number contrast with the strangeness of the event, showing public institutions trying to impose order on a crisis whose scale is still coming into view.